Oracle Restart – going , going , gone?

Posted by John Hallas on January 13, 2014

Oracle restart is an 11GR2 feature which ensures that all services on a standalone installation start up in the correct order. As such it seems to work well. One bugbear I have with it is that it changes the order of entries in the /etc/oratab file. Personally I like my oratab to be ordered in terms of database (most used first), ASM, then agents. In that way when I logon to a box and it automatically sets the SID it picks up the first entry which is commonly the database I want to work with.

Technically it is the oraagent process, which is new in 11GR2 which updates the oratab file, but as that sits under the ohasd directory in the GI home then I consider it to be part of the Restart process. As a bye you can make your oratab file read only as long as you remember to change permissions when adding a new databases or removing one.

To the main purpose of this post. It appears that Oracle Restart is deprecated in 12c although no replacement is on the horizon.

“Oracle Restart is deprecated in Oracle Database 12c. Oracle Restart is currently restricted to manage single-instance Oracle databases and Oracle ASM instances only, and is subject to desupport in future releases. Oracle continues to provide Oracle ASM as part of the Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation for Standalone and Cluster deployments.”

That is a bit of a shock, as it is still fully documented in the Oracle 12c docs for installation etc. The MoS note Support Impact of the Deprecation Announcement of Oracle Restart with Oracle Database 12c (Doc ID 1584742.1) gives more detail and tantalisingly seems to suggest that the deprecation may be revoked.

“While typically, a feature is only deprecated once the superseding feature has been announced, on occasion this order cannot be kept. In this case, one may assume that the deprecation announcement will last – without effect – until the superseding feature has been released or the deprecation is revoked. In case of the deprecation announcement of Oracle Restart, the superseding feature has not been released yet. Therefore, Oracle will maintain Oracle Restart in its current form and will continue to fix BUGs for this product until Oracle Restart is officially de-supported, which would constitute the removal of the code.”

It would be reasonable to think that Oracle intended having a replacement ready for the initial release of 12C but it was not available in time and will come out in 12CR2